


Teamwork: A Teacher's Guide

by orphan_account



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Asshole Teacher Kakashi, Hatake Kakashi Has No Social Skills, More tags later, Team Feels, probably gonna have to put trigger warnings on this thing at some point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23507449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In which Kakashi decides that Team Seven would have been just fine, and avoided a lot of future problems if they'd been more closely-knit, trusted each other more, and cooperated as a team. He goes back in time to fix it.Kakashi doesn't have a great history with interpersonal relationships. But speaking from years of wartime experience, Kakashi knows that there is one thing that can unite a group of people like no other: shared trauma.
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is planned to go basically only as far in time as the chuunin exams and the subsequent invasion by sand and sound. It will follow some canon events and not others. It will jump between POVs, as it does in the prologue. I am also hoping to drag it into Team 7 OT3 territory.

Hatake Kakashi woke to a brand new day.

...is how this story might have started, but actually Kakashi woke with a splitting headache on the floor of his dusty room inside ANBU HQ, and it was to a day that was looking rather weary around the edges.

Days, in general, were not usually lived twice.

But this one was.

Kakashi got up and checked the date. It looked as though he’d gotten it right, but he couldn’t be entirely sure. Space-time jutsu weren’t usually experimented with at this level.

He peered out the tiny, dingy window. Tsunade’s face wasn’t on the mountain, but Minato’s was. Hmm, promising.

There were three quick knocks. “Hatake, your mission report is two weeks overdue...” a voice came through the heavily reinforced wood of his door, sounding torn between hesitance and exasperation.

Kakashi tuned that out. Working quickly, he changed out of his black-and-bone armour and headed out - through the window, of course. Doorways were for amateurs.

Also, taking the doorway seemed likely to involve talking to the person on the other side of the door who wanted his report. There were more important things to do first. Or, just, you know.

In general.

As a rule, paperwork was kind of low on Kakashi’s list of priorities.

Konoha’s rooftops sped under him, streaming away with every powerful leap. It took him a few moments to get used to the feel of his younger body. Shinobi led hard lives and Kakashi was used to the feeling of that stamped upon him in the form of chronic aches, finicky joints and inflexible scar tissue. But now there were scars missing, among other things.

That ankle he’d gotten used to reinforcing with his chakra didn’t actually need to be reinforced.

...because nobody had jammed a senbon all the way through to the bone yet.

Huh.

Maybe he could avoid that, this time.

He had less chakra, too. His pool was only a little smaller than it had been before he’d abandoned the future, but his reserves were seriously worn. He remembered the ANBU days with a sudden clarity: back-to-back A-ranks, fast and messy solo missions, never stopping until he crashed.

It was very different to having his own genin team.

Kakashi dropped from a roof and stretched, feeling the cracks and pops in his spine where he carried stress. The memorial stone loomed, dark and familiar. He rubbed his fingers across the names he knew so well, but he didn’t say anything to Obito, didn’t murmur to Rin or beg Minato for guidance.

Time drifted as he contemplated the stone. Finally, he stood up. Having successfully time travelled to roughly the correct point in the time line, Kakashi was eager to stalk his cute students.

He left the stone. It, and all the mistakes that made Kakashi who he was, would still be there tomorrow.

And the next day.

He couldn’t time travel that far, after all.

Sakura was by far the easiest of his kids to find and also the most accessible. She was very... small.

He shook that off. Of course she was very small, she was only seven or eight. Her parents were civilians, which meant that her mother was at home, puttering around the house and garden at a snail’s pace while her daughter read in her room.

She hadn’t even begun to resemble the fierce woman he knew in the future. Right now she was all fluttering pink hair and white lace and tiny fingers. Hard to imagine she could kill a ninja with one hit.

Of course, she couldn’t yet. He wasn’t entirely certain she could actually hit yet, let alone do any damage.

He watched for a while, but he didn’t attempt contact, and neither she nor her mother ever noticed his scrutiny.

Civilians were strange creatures.

He left with none of them the wiser.

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible to enter the Uchiha compound and spy on the second son of the clan head, but it posed a few more risks than Kakashi was really comfortable with. The idea that there were still about a hundred people with sharingan wandering around Konoha took some mental adjustment. So instead he walked past Gai’s favourite training grounds - which, somehow, had not changed, not in years and years, because Maito Gai was a creature of habit.

He pretended not to notice when Gai started yelling to him.

Kakashi let his Eternal Rival catch up with him just outside the walls of the compound.

Then Gai began speaking, and Kakashi put his filthy book away and made a vague noise of interest, which was a rookie mistake for anybody required to deal with Gai on a regular basis. The faintest hint of interest in - or even tolerance of - Gai’s loud orations on youth and spirit and guts generally meant getting stuck listening for a while.

In Kakashi’s case it was actually a good thing, relatively speaking, since it gave him an excuse to be standing right there when Sasuke ran through the gates.

Kakashi’s Sasuke, even before he went completely insane and fled the village with Orochimaru, was a sullen, supercilious, prideful little shit. Kakashi had never, ever entertained the idea of Uchiha Sasuke as a sweet-tempered, smiling, adorable child.

For a moment Kakashi suspected some kind of forbidden genjutsu, but then he remembered that Sasuke was, like Sakura, tiny and had virtually no ninja skills.

Which meant that at some point, he had actually been that small and cute and friendly.

Kakashi didn’t get much opportunity to witness this novelty, though, because Itachi was actually more cripplingly attached to Sasuke than he’d expected - which was saying kind of a lot. The elder brother, barely thirteen and already moving with the catlike grace of the ANBU, had keen senses and better instincts. Sasuke may not have noticed, but he was definitely being watched by more than just Kakashi today.

Itachi caught Kakashi’s eye briefly and a series of almost invisible expressions flickered across his face. He settled at last on field sign, querying if he was needed.

Kakashi let his right eye crinkle in a gentle crescent and waved one hand. He briefly lamented that there was no field sign for ‘no, no, do continue stalking your brother,’ and instead flashed him the all clear.

Itachi tilted his head for a second and then left, dogging Sasuke’s steps as though he was afraid somebody might take him away.

...which, uh, in hindsight...

Hmm. Perhaps Itachi had better instincts than anybody had given him credit for.

After succumbing to Gai’s insistence that it was Kakashi’s turn to choose the challenge (and subsequently winning at jan-ken-pon), he left the Green Beast climbing the Hokage monument with his feet tied together and went in search of his final student.

Naruto was...

Kakashi sighed.

He found him outside the orphanage, glowering sullenly at a bunch of kids who were running around screaming - presumably they were playing, although Kakashi had never been given much to playfulness as a child (except when it was enforced by his sensei, which -- well, never mind) and had no experience to draw from.

He perched on the fence of the orphanage and watched for a while.

Mostly Naruto just stared at the other kids and scowled.

At twelve, Naruto had been defiant and doggedly cheerful and a little bit prickly. At seventeen, he’d been a natural disaster on legs.

As a kid, he was just sad and resentful.

Kakashi stayed long enough to make sure that none of the kid’s physical needs were being neglected. He learned that Naruto was last in line for everything from food to bathing, that he was ignored until he shouted so loudly nobody could pretend they hadn’t heard, and that he was yelled at for very minor and occasionally fictitious infractions against the orphanage rules.

He was (mostly) fed and (sort of) warm and, if not happy, at least safe.

It would do.

Kakashi left.

He hadn’t given it more than a cursory glance before he left, but Kakashi’s room at ANBU HQ was identical to how he remembered it: tiny, cramped and functional. There was a bench and a single stove element in one corner, a futon in the other, an empty bookshelf and a dusty desk in the third. A door led to a closet-sized bathroom.

The only part of the room that really seemed lived-in and homey was the old blanket thrown across the futon, and that was only so familiar because it smelled like a pile of dogs had been there recently. Probably because they had. Kakashi sprawled on the bed with a leg dangling over the edge. He pulled out the copy of Icha Icha in his pocket and perused it absently. He’d read this one enough times that he could use it to occupy his hands and eye while more complicated thoughts ticked over in his head.

Kakashi was a little early in the timeline, really. He had to get access to Sasuke, but that would be virtually impossible until after the massacre - he wasn’t exactly on good terms with the Uchiha Clan after his appropriation of Obito’s sharingan.

He contemplated interfering in Sakura’s early development for a few moments, but it would surely seem suspicious for an ANBU captain known for being a loner to take such an interest in a young civilian girl.

He had more excuse for meddling with Naruto, he supposed. It could always be argue, should anybody ask, that the kid was Minato-sensei’s son and Kakashi was just checking up on him...

But Naruto wouldn’t end up on his team if he wasn’t the dead last.

He sighed. It would be best not to interfere.

Kakashi had known the massacre was soon, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite so soon. He found himself called to the scene with Uzuki and Tenzou the next night.

Everybody knew that Sasuke was the only survivor, but time had blunted Kakashi’s memory of the event.

The bright moonlight leeched all the colour from the compound, and the bodies of the Uchiha clan lay slumped and broken, strewn carelessly across the grounds like abandoned chew toys. The ANBU mindset was one that saw targets, not people - but knowing Sasuke, knowing Itachi’s circumstances... Kakashi found the ANBU mindset harder to fall into.

Maybe he was out of practice. He and Tenzou prowled between the bodies, watching Uzuki’s back while she tended Sasuke.

He breathed and murmured, but he didn’t wake up. It would be weeks before Sasuke woke up.

It was little wonder he was such a giant pain in the butt as he got older.

When they reported back to the Hokage, Sarutobi looked weary, but not as though he’d just knowingly allowed the slaughter of several hundred of his own people. Kakashi wasn’t sure what to think about that. Being the Hokage was a terrible job most of the time, but the Uchiha massacre was...

Difficult to comprehend.

The Sandaime Hokage made no mention of wishing to see Sasuke, or of wanting to be kept updated on his status, just like last time.

Last time, Kakashi hadn’t wondered why and didn’t bother asking. It wasn’t his job.

This time, he didn’t have to ask.

Itachi hadn’t really wanted to permanently injure him, after all. He’d recover.

If Sarutobi wasn’t going to be there, Kakashi would. When Sasuke woke, Kakashi knew shortly after the doctors. He spent an hour hashing it out with Obito at the memorial stone, wondering if he was really doing the right thing.

(Obito didn’t answer. Typical.)

Still, he thought, staring at the monument with his good eye, Sasuke wasn’t the only person who’d lost his whole family young. Their deaths weren’t even as hideously unfair as the White Fang’s had been - although he supposed Sasuke didn’t - couldn’t be allowed to - know that.

Kakashi’s thoughts whirled like a dog chasing its tail. He had strong feelings about Sasuke -coming back, he’d had half a mind to fix half of their problems by killing him in his sleep. He wasn’t without empathy, but at some point the kid had to be accountable for his own bad decisions.

His many, many bad decisions.

Really, from the massacre onward, Sasuke was nothing but a giant pile bad decisions smacking into other bad decisions. A veritable pinball game of poor judgement.

It took him a few minutes to remind himself that Sasuke hadn’t made any of those bad decisions yet. He wasn’t even a genin. He’d only been conscious for an hour.

Kakashi rubbed his eye and sighed.

How the hell was he meant to talk to Sasuke? Who was he even kidding, he didn’t know how to do this. Even aside from his own mixed feelings on the matter, Kakashi didn’t like children. He couldn’t talk to them. He hadn’t even known how to talk to kids when he was a kid.

Maybe they could just lock Sasuke up until after Orochimaru was dead.

“Sound in theory, but the Hokage would probably have a lot of questions,” he muttered to the memorial stone.

Kakashi picked himself up and got going.

Of course, when he climbed through the window of Sasuke’s hospital room, he’d been thinking about twelve-year-old Sasuke with his glowers and scowls.

The person on the bed was drowning in a sea of crisp white linens, tiny and tense and hunched over with his hands covering his ears.

Yeah, Kakashi had no idea what he was doing here. He looked at Sasuke and thought fondly of leaving to beg Sarutobi for a nice A-rank.

When Sasuke woke up, there was nobody to visit him.

He had no family.

He was ...an orphan.

There was a doctor, who came in and checked his head with a pulse of chakra and a few half-mumbled comments. She adjusted his IV and left just as swiftly as she’d come.

Sasuke sat up in his hospital bed, but he hadn’t been told he was allowed to leave yet. He couldn’t think clearly, and there were holes in his memory, but he felt strangely calm.

He could hear a clock ticking from somewhere in the room. He wrapped his arms around his knees and tried not to think of a cool voice counting down the seconds.

Seventy hours, forty seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds left.

Sasuke put his hands over his ears.

Maybe if he just kept them there...

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when a strange man in a mask climbed through his window. Sasuke’s eyes flicked to the Konoha hitai-ate. He watched him pick up his medical report and examine it.

He saw the man‘s mouth move under his mask and cautiously lowered his hands from his head to hear the last of his sentence: “...been some genjutsu,” he said.

“Genjutsu?” Sasuke repeated.

“Mmm?” the man looked up. He had truly ridiculous hair.

There was more silence. Sasuke watched the man, and, after a while, the man put down his file and watched him back.

“I don’t know you,” Sasuke said finally, when the ticking of the clock felt unbearable.

“Ahh...” the man scratched the side of his face. “Nope,” he agreed. His only visible eye curved into a little crescent. Was he smiling?

Sasuke didn’t know where to go from there. He frowned and looked away.

The man sighed.

The clock ticked.

“My best friend was from your clan,” said the man suddenly. Sasuke looked back at him and realised that visible eye was twitching a little.

There was a long, awkward silence. “...right?” said Sasuke eventually.

The man scratched his ridiculous hair. “My family’s dead, too,” he added.

Sasuke looked at him blankly. “I... see.”

“Maa... well, it doesn’t go away, but it gets better.”

Sasuke felt his own temper soften a little. Whoever this nutjob was, he was clearly trying.

...trying what, Sasuke didn’t know.

“Aa,” he said, and hoped he was a little reassuring to the strange man.

That visible eye crinkled into a smiling crescent again and the man headed for the window.

“Wait!” Sasuke’s voice was loud. It surprised both of them. The man turned, eyebrow raised. “...can you take the clock with you?”

The man paused, and for a second there was a sharp, weighty understanding in his single eye. “Aa,” he said softly.

He left with the clock.

The silence was deafening.

(Better. But deafening.)


	2. Chapter 2

Kakashi left the clock on the wall next to the photograph of his old team where it ticked like some maddening sound track to his ongoing time travel catastrophe. It wasn’t entirely comforting to have it there.

That whole conversation with Sasuke could have gone... better.

He rubbed his visible eye.

He knew that to meet her potential Sakura needed self-confidence and Naruto needed... well, probably a good kick up the butt, actually, given what Kakashi remembered of him at twelve... but mostly Naruto would turn out all right even if he was left to his own devices.

In Kakashi’s time, Sasuke had lived in the empty Uchiha district, surrounded by relics of his slaughtered family as a constant reminder of how he was too weak to help. Kakashi didn’t really mind how crazy the kid got - being poorly adjusted was practically a requirement for jounin promotion - but he needed to change some of his attitudes before they became set.

Sasuke’s warped I-Need-Only-Myself inferiority (superiority?) complex needed to be ended before it could really take hold, and he could only do that if he didn’t live a life of total isolation.

Sasuke, Kakashi realised with a sinking dread in his stomach, needed company.

Real, human company.

Because Kakashi was so good at that.

In some ways, Naruto was the easiest to deal with. The ANBU who kept an eye on Naruto might have noticed, but all they could really say was that Hatake-taichou was keeping a close eye on the fox kid, which, to most of them, was probably a blessing.

He was pretty sure he’d get in a lot more trouble if anybody found out he was keeping a close eye on Sakura. Sakura was a civilian. She was delicate. She was wholly unconnected to him. She was a cute underage little girl, and he was a mask-wearing ANBU who read porn in public.

Sometimes Kakashi used his blatant stalking of Naruto as a veil for his much more subtle surveillance of Sakura. It worked surprisingly - even depressingly - well.

Of course, the Hokage kept a careful eye on Naruto, but Sarutobi and Kakashi had one very casual conversation about it.

“Maa...” Kakashi scratched the back of his neck. “He looks more like Minato-sensei every time I see him,” he admitted.

And Sarutobi had heaved an enormous sigh and simply nodded before sending him on his way.

By mid year, Naruto had moved out of the orphanage - he was old enough to dye everybody’s hair green, the matron argued, which meant he was old enough to live on his own.

Kakashi didn’t think that was a very good measure of adulthood.

“If he was an adult ninja,” he pointed out to the Sandaime when he returned from an A-rank mission and discovered Naruto had been moved, “he wouldn’t have gotten caught.”

Sarutobi muttered something about Jiraiya’s influence and did not dignify this with a real answer.

Kakashi was right, though. He knew he was.

He crept into the boy’s apartment while he was sleeping and left a green Post-It note stuck to his fridge.

[ It was obvious when you were the only one with undyed hair. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art. ]

He signed it with a henohenomoheji. Anonymous. There.

Naruto’d do better next time.

He was passing by - innocently passing by! - Naruto’s roof when he woke up and discovered the note that had been left for him.

Naruto seemed both shocked and thrilled that somebody had been paying attention to his prank. And angry.

“Bet he couldn’t have done it, stupid letterface...” he was muttering into his morning instant ramen. But he kept the note, crumpled and smudged as it was.

It was a little sad, really.

It made him think.

Sasuke wasn’t the only one who could do with a little more human contact.

But with Naruto, he didn’t actually have to talk to him, did he? He could just...

Yeah.

So when Naruto flooded the teachers’ offices at the academy, Kakashi left him another note. This one was on a little piece of stock card he’d nicked from Inoichi’s flower shop (he had to keep his skills sharp, after all).

[ The flooded offices was a good start, but you could have used the time when everybody was running around trying to fix it to set up something better. What were you doing while they were all distracted? ] This time, he left it on the kitchen table with a coil of ninja wire.

The wire came in handy, although Kakashi sincerely doubted the Hokage appreciated it when Iruka arrived at the mission desk covered in glitter.

From then on, Kakashi kept up a running critique of his pranks: stealth, execution, conceptualisation. He was meticulous. Naruto didn’t necessarily appreciate constructive criticism, but he improved over time.

On Ibiki’s letterhead from T&I he wrote: [ Mizuki probably deserved it, but he outranks you. Never directly attack an opponent whose advantage is derived from its position - geographically or otherwise. At the academy, he’s a teacher. Where is he not a teacher? ]

So it was probably Kakashi’s fault that Mizuki’s entire wardrobe ended up covered in orange paint. So what? If he’d been a little smarter, a prepubescent kid wouldn’t have been able to break into his house.

On the back of one of Ichiraku's takeaway menus he scrawled: [ Next time you steal the class rankings and rearrange all the files, henge into Kiba. ]

He was kind of surprised, although perhaps he shouldn’t have been, when Naruto started writing back.

Written - badly, so badly - on the back of a receipt for thirty two packages of instant ramen, purchased in bulk: { are you a ghost? }

On the hard outer skin of a pumpkin, in permanent marker: [ Not yet. Eat your vegetables. ]

On the upturned bottom of a styrofoam take-out container: { no u. what are you doing in my apartment. }

Pinned to the table with a spare kunai: [ Criticising your pranks. They’re not very good. ]

Written in huge characters on the side of the empty bulk-package ramen box: { WHAT NO MY PRANKS ARE AWESOME }

Pinned to the side of a bag of tomatoes: [ If your pranks were awesome, nobody would know it was you who did them. ]

On the back of his own soggy homework: { tomatoes, thanks! well whats the point of that? }

When Kakashi returned from his B-rank escort mission - which was completely uneventful - he contemplated how Naruto had somehow persuaded the academy’s sprinkler system to spray everything with tomato juice. It was creative, at least.

Still, he thought, gathering all Naruto’s packaged ramen into a giant garbage bag, sometimes kids had to learn their lessons the hard way.

On the side of a paper take-away bag, in messy caps: [ I have your ramen. You have until 10:30 to eat your vegetables before I dump it in the lake. ]

Naruto’s cries of dismay were heard all across the village.

Inside his room at ANBU HQ, Kakashi looked up from his battered porn, eye crinkling into a smile.

He put off visiting Sasuke.

He started to feel Obito’s petulant glower every time he visited the cenotaph.

“You can’t look at me like that,” he muttered to the stone. “You’re dead.”

It didn’t stop the stinging tears from pooling in his right eye. Obito was always such a crybaby.

In general, Sakura required the least actual attention. It was a trap Kakashi’d fallen into before, and he had no intention of allowing it to continue during her training with him.

However, it was true that she had actual parents (civilian parents, he reasoned, were still parents), and she didn’t need Kakashi there to make sure she ate actual food or didn’t die from the fungus growing in her sink. Her childhood was, while difficult in some respects, not nearly as traumatic as Sasuke’s or Naruto’s. Mostly, he left her be.

Well... mostly.

Some things he couldn’t resist.

Kakashi was clothed in black fabric and white armour, returning from a particularly grim mission out toward Suna. It was probably only a B-rank, really, but any mission where ANBU were called upon to kill children under ten was A-rank at a minimum. The pay wasn’t worth it, but at least nobody felt like they were being insulted.

The Konoha Shinobi Archive, better known among ninja as “the library,” was dim and dusty. It was completely deserted, which might have been because it was one in the morning.

He headed in, avoiding the floor - which needed shovelling more than sweeping, probably specifically so people would be forced to leave tracks - and headed over toward the open-access areas.

Kakashi borrowed ‘The Beginner’s Guide To Genjutsu Construction’ the same way he borrowed all the books he’d ever taken from the library (which was to say, quietly, in the middle of the night, leaving no traces).

He glanced at the sky and sniffed, and, determining that there would be no rain for days, he left it resting against the tree where Sakura hid from the other girls at lunch.

Then he went to bed and slept for two days.

Some missions were harder than others.

Kakashi eventually had to go see Sasuke.

He really did.

The kid needed somebody.

He didn’t talk to the other kids. He didn’t talk to his teachers. As far as Kakashi could see, the only time he really talked was to the family shrine where he burned incense for his parents.

At that point, Kakashi figured he had to be better than nothing.

Also Pakkun wouldn’t go without him.

Kakashi took his sweet time getting there, though. He decided to go at about noon and didn’t manage to show up until half six, when the sun was setting, red and bloody, in the west. All that procrastinating made him hungry, so he got dinner on the way.

Dinner, as it happened, were onigiri with what smelled like flaked pan-fried salmon inside them. They were made with love.

Not Kakashi’s love, for sure, but he was sure if Akimichi Chourin knew to which cause she was donating her twenty-one delicious rice balls, she’d have given him her blessing. Kakashi was just being a conscientious guest in not putting her out with these petty concerns.

There was also the handful of cherry tomatoes Kakashi did actually buy, because you just didn’t steal from civilians (it would be like stealing from one of his pack’s puppies, really; Konoha civilians were about as capable as a newborn pup, and just as much his responsibility). He wouldn’t have bothered, but he had a sneaking suspicion he’d need to bribe Sasuke to let him in the house.

When Sasuke opened the door he was still a tiny, tousle-headed boy. He was barefoot indoors, dressed in black pants and an oversized shirt - too small to be his father’s, too big to be his, and Kakashi didn’t want to be right about this so he didn’t even try to smell whose scent lingered on it.

But he could, anyway.

Itachi was an ANBU captain, and he knew his scent.

Yeah, Kakashi was in no way prepared to deal with Sasuke dressed in his brother’s clothes, staring suspiciously up at him with those huge dark eyes.

What would Minato have done?

Minato was kind of a while ago, unfortunately. Kakashi’s clearest memories of him were those seen through Obito’s eye, which he mostly used when trying to murder somebody.

He stared at Sasuke for a few long seconds, sleepily blinking his good eye.

“Hi,” said Kakashi, tilting his head and smiling with the crescent of his eye.

Sasuke closed the door.

Kakashi let him, because Minato definitely would not have forced his way through a tiny orphan’s door. Probably. He thought.

(Sometimes Minato had done really weird stuff, though, and people had just found it kind of funny. Part of his teenaged fascination with the man was that Kakashi could never quite predict him.)

“Okay,” said Kakashi slowly. He thought about it. Why was Sasuke always the difficult one?

(Oh. Massacre. Genjutsu torture. Right.)

“Do you want your clock back?” he asked the door.

“No,” spat Sasuke from inside. Which was good, because Kakashi didn’t have it with him. “Go away, or - ”

There was an awkward silence, where Kakashi could have sworn Sasuke was hiding the words ‘I’ll call the police’. Except the police were the Uchiha clan, and the Uchiha clan was dead, so there was no recourse for tiny orphaned boys with dark circles beneath their eyes and paper-white skin.

After a second, Kakashi shrugged. He strolled around the back, climbed the back wall of the house, broke in through a poorly-repaired section of roof and descended into the corridor.

There was a room with a low table and cushions to sit on, which Kakashi figured would do for dinner. From there he could see through to the genkan, where Sasuke was outlined by the doorway. His shoulders were tensed, and he was watching the door like something might prowl through it and eat him.

“Yo,” said Kakashi casually, setting his ill-gotten onigiri on the table.

Sasuke spun on his toes and didn’t make a sound to betray his fright and surprise. He did, however, look even whiter somehow.

“You’re in my house,” he said. His voice was even, but his hands were trembling.

Kakashi hummed his agreement. “You should make tea when you have guests, Sasuke-kun,” he reproved gently, smiling at him as he set out the food.

“What,” said Sasuke. Then, “Did you climb in through a window?” His voice was half accusing, half embarrassed. Leaving an open window was basically an invitation in a shinobi neighbourhood... and the Uchiha compound, no matter how empty, was definitely a shinobi neighbourhood.

Sasuke hadn’t left a window open. But he didn’t need to know that.

“Maa,” Kakashi drawled. “Well, you would’t let me in through the door.”

“Because you’re not wanted,” Sasuke pointed out.

Kakashi raised his eyebrow - well, both of them actually, but he was aware that only one was visible. “Such manners,” he said clicking his tongue. “Weren’t you making tea?”

Sasuke seemed torn between throwing a fit and trying to make Kakashi leave - and given the calculating look in his eyes he seemed aware of precisely how well that would go for him - or acquiescing in a sullen snit.

Sullen snit usually won with Sasuke, in Kakashi’s experience.

But maybe if he got there early enough it wouldn’t be, you know, his default mood.

With a sigh, Kakashi got up. “Well,” he said, “you’re only eight. I suppose I can’t expect very good manners,” he said dramatically, heaving himself toward the kitchen.

Sasuke scowled. “Sit down,” he growled, before stalking off.

Kakashi flopped back down, grinning inwardly. Little Sasuke hadn’t had enough time on his own yet to become as rude as he was when Kakashi knew him. The fear of Uchiha Mikoto’s wrath was still strong in him... as it remained in his elder brother, actually.

Sasuke looked annoyed when he brought back the tea - two cups, a pot, a tray, even, held with surprising deftness in his child’s hands - but not afraid anymore.

Kakashi prodded the onigiri toward him.

Sasuke eyed them.

Kakashi lifted the tea cup to his lips and drank. It always tasted a little weird through his mask, but it was worth it for the look Sasuke was giving him.

“Maa... It’s rude to stare,” he reminded him lazily.

“It’s rude to cover your face in another’s home,” Sasuke shot back.

“We’ll both be rude then,” Kakashi said, shrugging philosophically.

There was a long silence. Kakashi drank his tea, and Sasuke kept his eyes on Kakashi.

The silence stretched.

He kind of wished Sasuke would look away, because he was actually pretty hungry. The rice balls smelled good - unsurprising, since he’d stolen them from an Akimichi house - and he wanted them in his belly, not sitting on the table with Sasuke’s hard, untrusting eyes keeping them from him.

Sasuke didn’t look away.

His eyes seemed to catch pretty much everything, although not in the way a ninja’s would have. Sasuke just looked anxious.

The circles under his eyes indicated that he wasn’t really sleeping.

“Eh?” Kakashi pointed over Sasuke’s shoulder, feigning surprise.

Sasuke knew it was a ruse - he must have, truly - but he looked anyway, because that was the instinct of the thing. Kakashi took the opportunity to shovel a rice ball into his mouth. Mm, Akimichi-san was a good cook.

When Sasuke scowled and turned back there was one less, and Kakashi was still smiling at him from beneath his mask.

He took a long sip of his tea. “It’s good tea,” he complimented.

This seemed to annoy Sasuke more than it pleased him. “What do you want?” he asked finally.

“Ahhh..." he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. He paused thoughtfully. “What does anybody really want?” he wondered.

One of Sasuke’s eyebrows twitched.

Kakashi's visible eye curved up. Serenely, he drank his tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg, I was so surprised at how many people commented! You guys all rock. Here, have a chapter early. :)


	3. Chapter 3

Sakura found the book Kakashi had left her on a sunny Tuesday morning. Ami and Hinako were doing their level best to ruin her day, and little Sakura didn't have the self-confidence to brush their taunts off.

She'd gotten a lower score than Hinata-san on their test of the theory of chakra manipulation, and suddenly it was all "so there's not even a brain under that giant forehead after all?" and "what is it you are good at, then, Sakura?"

Sakura had wanted to point out that she'd certainly ranked higher than them, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she focused her attention on making herself scarce. If they couldn't find her, they couldn't make her miserable. Simple.

Her hiding spot was down the far end of the area where the students took their break, well away from the academy. There was a big tree there, one which the other kids ignored because it had no branches low enough for climbing on. The roots were so large that when she sat in a hollow dip between them, Sakura was basically invisible from the other students.

Initially, she looked upon the book with shock and resentment: somebody had found her spot! Somebody else was using her spot! How could they? It was hers!

Grudgingly, she supposed, there was no reason why somebody else couldn’t use her spot. But she had the terrible fear that she might come down there one day and find the spot behind the tree already inhabited.

But it was in the academy grounds. She couldn’t claim to own it, could she?

Sakura shoved the book under a root and ignored it. Somebody would come to get it, she was sure. But even when she left it there for a night, for two nights, nobody actually collected the book.

Maybe they'd just forgotten it. Maybe they weren't coming back?

Curiously, she pulled it away from the tree root she’d jammed it beneath, brushed the dirt and leaves from its cover and opened to the first page of The Beginner’s Guide to Genjutsu Construction.

It was... interesting.

When the instructor called for class to resume, for the first time ever Sakura did not obey. She didn’t really like any of the other students, and she was very absorbed in her book.

She was two hours late.

“Er,” she said later, under Suzume-sensei’s stern gaze, “I was reading a book...”

Somewhere across the village, Kakashi sneezed.

Sakura finished the book before the week was up, but it took her a lot longer to work out how to use any of the information.

The inside of the book said it came from the Konoha Shinobi Archive, so it was immediately obvious that she was not supposed to have it. Until she graduated, she was a civilian, and civilians didn’t have right of entry to the Archive.

She wasn’t sure what would happen if she told anybody she had it. A book that went missing just so happened to land in the hands of an academy student? It seemed a little suspicious.

Sakura simply decided not to tell anybody.

They didn’t even learn genjutsu at the academy, anyway. It wasn’t like anybody would notice a sudden spike in her training - they weren’t looking for it.

The Beginner’s Guide to Genjutsu Construction found itself clumsily recovered and slotted into her book shelf between a history book and an adventure novel.

Three weeks later a scroll appeared, rather mysteriously, in the same spot.

Sakura hesitated over it.

Forgetting a book once was one thing, but... she frowned.

Somebody was, obviously, leaving things for her. She inspected it closely without opening it, wondering if she should tell a teacher. She’d get in trouble for not mentioning the book, but, well --

“Ne, Sakura,” Ino’s voice rang out. She sounded exasperated.

Sakura shoved the scroll into her bag and went to meet her.

“That idiot Naruto picked a fight with Kiba,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

Sakura blinked, but let Ino grab her by the wrist and steer her along. A fight was always worth watching - even if it was Naruto fighting and everybody knew he’d lose. She hurried along behind Ino.

The scroll lay forgotten in her bag until she got home that evening.

In pulling her homework out she found the scroll again. A guilty feeling rose in her stomach, but Sakura did her best to ignore it. None of this was her fault.

It didn’t look like anything too dangerous. Scrolls like this one were usually for personal use - studying or small summonings. In a few months her own class would be given very similar scrolls for the three E-rank jutsu they had to know to graduate.

Cautiously, she unrolled the scroll.

Nothing leapt out to murder her. In fact, all she saw was writing.

For a second she was actually a little disappointed - summoning scrolls had a wide range of applications in fiction, and a few of her favourite romances featured them as major plot devices.

Actually, the scroll seemed to be full of somebody’s hideous handwriting. Her disappointment didn’t last, though, because as soon as she could decipher the first line she realised that she was looking at the scroll for a technique. It wasn’t one they learned in the academy, though - in fact, it wasn’t one she’d even heard of before.

“D-rank,” she murmured to herself, carefully examining the instructions.

Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique was a genjutsu of the lowest order. A rudimentary set of triggers formed from chakra that gently nudged the human brain: fear, visual stimuli, auditory stimuli and a brief time delay. That was it. Illusions affecting touch and smell and taste were more difficult to create, but this...

Sakura read it again.

It would be very challenging for her to learn, she decided.

But... it didn’t seem entirely outside the realm of possibility. It looked a lot easier than some of the physical feats she knew would be expected of her during her graduation exam in two years.

“Sakura!” her mother’s voice interrupted her musings. “Dinner’s ready!”

Sakura dropped the scroll in the sudden fright of discovery. It took a few seconds for her heart to slow back down. “U-Un!” she called back, tossing the scroll back into her bag beneath her history notes, and went to help her mother set the table.

Kakashi was dressed in jounin blues and a minor genjutsu and he was attached to a corner of Mizuki’s ceiling with chakra lined feet.

If he hadn’t known that the man was a traitor waiting to happen, Kakashi would have felt bad for Mizuki. He hadn’t been paying a lot of attention the first time around, but as far as he knew Naruto had never been quite so single-minded in his pursuit of one of the academy teachers. It was, Kakashi suspected, something to do with the phrase he’d thoughtlessly written on a note some time ago: Mizuki probably deserved it.

Well.

Kakashi wasn’t wrong, but...

But...

Naruto was below, unscrewing the fifth and last faucet in the house. He’d rationed out the flavouring packets from his ramen carefully, and in doing so saved up enough to hide water-soluble flavourings behind the aerator.

From what Kakashi could tell, peering over the edge of Icha Icha Tactics - a book he should incinerate because it hadn’t yet been written, really (he, uh, kept forgetting) - Naruto’s true mastery was in the flavours. He’d packed the shower head tightly with the ones with the most powdered chilli. The tap in the tiny laundry room was full of some hideously sugary sweet-sour flavouring that would be hell to get out of any clothing. The tap outside received a basic chicken curry injection, which was probably the most innocuous of the lot.

The flavouring in the bathroom sink was a bit of a mystery to Kakashi, since all he could tell from the packaging was that it was “special curly friend noodles!” flavour. He was... suspicious.

He was a little worried that Naruto ate those, because as far as he knew ‘curly friend’ was not a flavour.

Now, finally, he was rapidly returning the aerator to the kitchen tap, which he had recently filled with what appeared to be all the flavours he had left over: mushroom, chilli and lime and cabbage, with a heavily sweetened soy to top all that off.

Kakashi’s nose was very sensitive, and it was actually starting to hurt.

Silently, he slipped away... and back to Naruto’s apartment, where he paused to write [make sure you have an alibi] in soap on the bathroom mirror.

A few seconds later, he returned again with a huge zucchini. [You remember what happened last time you didn’t eat your vegetables.]

Sasuke didn’t know much about cooking for himself, really. He’d figured out the rice cooker over the past months, but he missed his mother’s cooking.

...he missed a lot of things, really.

Things still smelled like his parents for a while, and sometimes he went and sat just inside their bedroom door with his back to the wall. He breathed deeply and pretended that everything was okay. They were only gone for a moment.

Sometimes he woke up in the dark disoriented, confused by the flood of memories at the start of the day, and the first thing he said was “Kai!”

Sometimes he just didn’t sleep.

The weirdo masked ninja - Kakashi-san, if he was to be believed - who kept showing up seemed to know precisely when he felt the most hopeless, when he felt like all his awful, conflicted, guilty feelings were going to crawl free of his human skin and race, screaming from the village.

There was often as long as a month between visits - just long enough for Sasuke to start thinking maybe he’d forgotten, maybe he wasn’t coming back, with a confused mix of relief and grief.

The second and third times the ninja showed up on Sasuke’s doorstep went more or less similarly to the first time. Sasuke didn’t like him, but it was...

He felt terrible for admitting it. He felt weak and vulnerable, and then so resentful he burned with it. And all of this was caught up in his feelings about -

Well. About that person. He tried not to think about that, but when he couldn’t sleep, when he couldn’t train anymore because his limbs hurt too much, when everything was silent and there were no people for miles, Sasuke missed Itachi. What he wanted, more than his mother, more than his whole family, more than to be strong - he wanted his brother to come back, and pat him on the head, and tell him it was going to be okay.

It was not going to be okay.

But it was... alright, sometimes, when the masked ninja came by, just to hear another person breathing in the same space.

That didn’t mean he looked forward to the visits. He was, after all, hideously annoying, rude, infuriating and condescending by turns. Sasuke could feel himself being manipulated by the man, and he was somehow powerless to stop it.

The fourth time Sasuke didn’t even answer the door - he just left by the back exit and Kakashi caught up with him before he’d even left the compound.

“Maa,” Kakashi said, holding his prize up by one heel as he strolled back to the main house. He had his face buried in Icha Icha, which he was holding in the other hand. “Sasuke-kun, anybody would think you didn’t like me.”

“I don’t like you,” Sasuke snarled. Kakashi kept a wary eye out, because he knew in a few years there’d be no time to read porn while Sasuke tried to hurt him, but at the present time Sasuke’s reach just wasn’t long enough.

Kakashi affected a demeanour of great personal injury, and dropped Sasuke on the floor of the genkan.

“You picked the lock,” Sasuke said incredulously, looking between Kakashi and the wide open door of his house.

“It wasn’t a very good lock," Kakashi drawled, which Sasuke knew to be a lie. “Tea?”

“Yes. No. No! Get out!” Sasuke lunged at him.

Kakashi scooped him up one handed and shook him like a disobedient puppy. He wasn’t sure he liked how comfortable he was getting with manhandling Sasuke, because it seemed like the sort of experience one got as, you know, a mother.

“If you’re good,” Kakashi said, struck by a sudden uncertain inspiration, “I’ll show you my summoning technique.” All kids liked dogs, right?

Sasuke gave him a suspicious look, even though he was hanging limply from Kakashi’s outstretched hand. “Your face,” he said shortly.

“Mm?”

“Show me your face. I’ve seen summons before.”

“No,” said Kakashi. He dropped him on his rump on the floor and went hunting for tea. Sasuke was a bit of a neat-freak, so his kitchen was vastly different to Naruto’s... which was for the better, since Kakashi had somehow worked himself into the unenviable position of spending time in the Uchiha house. Naruto’s apartment was practically a biohazard all on its own.

Sasuke made a noise of frustration. “Why do you keep coming here?” he snarled, trailing after him into the kitchen.

“Why do you keep getting angry about it?” Kakashi wondered. He set the tea pot on its little lacquered tray. “That’s not very well adjusted, Sasuke-kun.”

Sasuke looked hideously uncomfortable for a moment.

Kakashi shrugged that off. “Tea?” he suggested, swiping two cups and returning to the room with the low table.

Sasuke looked like he was contemplating mutiny.

Eventually, though, he crept into the room and sat down. He didn’t drink his tea, but like most of Sasuke’s behaviours that inched toward social contact, Kakashi counted this as a win.

It was about this point when Sarutobi decided to try to foist a genin team off on Kakashi. The first time around Kakashi had been forced to assume that he’d lost his mind, because he had a very, very good ANBU service record.

Age and hindsight allowed Kakashi to understand that ANBU had worn him so thin he was almost transparent. He was taking fewer missions this time around, but ANBU missions were sometimes more of a mental trial than a physical one.

He still failed his first team.

And his second.

Aaaand his third.

What? He knew exactly who he wanted on his team, and it wasn’t these brats.

“Kakashi,” said Sarutobi, rubbing his forehead. He looked weary, and exhaled a frustrated breath, sending a plume of smoke rising rapidly to the ceiling.

“Mm?” Kakashi said. He slouched back on his hips, but Icha Icha was nowhere to be seen.

“I understand that you think your place is in ANBU, but you’re going to burn out. You need to...” he shook his head.

“When you find me a team that can pass sensei’s test...” Kakashi shrugged.

Neither of them pointed out that Minato was hardly the first to use that test. Sarutobi rubbed his forehead and heaved a sigh. “Uchiha Sasuke is slated to graduate next year,” he said.

Smoke rose on his breath.

Kakashi waited.

“You’re the only jounin in the village left with the sharingan.You’ll be assigned to whichever team he ends up with.”

Inwardly, he was pleased. One year. One more year and then those three wouldn’t be classed as civilian children anymore. They’d be all Kakashi’s to do as he pleased with them.

On the outside, Kakashi shrugged philosophically. “I guess it can’t be helped,” he drawled.

Sarutobi gave him a hard look, but didn’t voice any suspicions he may have had.

Just as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg, so many friendly and exciting comments! Yaaaaay! : D
> 
> Best thing. :) Thanks guys.
> 
> I don't mean to make Sasuke so terribly angsty, but he's... his childhood isn't really going swimmingly right now.
> 
> Anyway, the next chapter is mostly written, but I'm gonna post it before I go into work on Thursday, I think? Mostly so I can reap the benefits of receiving any of the comments you may leave me here while I sit forever on hold trying to contact people on the phone because that is 98% of my job. #overlyhonestmethods
> 
> NEXT CHAPTER is the chapter in which graduation occurs. BE THERE. :)


	4. Chapter 4

Months passed. They passed a little too slowly for Kakashi's taste, but he filled them with loitering at the cenotaph and completing missions. He tried to find ones that were more physically demanding and less mentally scarring, but those were relative terms in ANBU. Otherwise, he continued to occupy himself with the (relatively) benevolent stalking of his future students.

Naruto's writing was still a complete mess, but the note passing had improved his reading comprehension better than any of Iruka's long lectures had. Improved, too, was his skill at planning his stupid pranks, which could certainly have applications in trap-making, or, more likely, in sabotage. A good saboteur could rake in money for Konoha, even if it was perhaps not what Minato-sensei might have wanted for his kid.

Kakashi generally didn't interfere with Naruto's pranks, but on one occasion he couldn't entirely help himself. He cast a teeny tiny genjutsu. Naruto sucked at detecting and removing them, so it didn't really require a lot of effort.

The look on Naruto's face when he'd turned from his artistic graffiti of the Hokages' faces and found that instead of whiskers and spirals he'd defaced the mountain with multicoloured text reading EAT YOUR VEGETABLES...

It was absolutely priceless.

Kakashi was so, so glad he was watching with the sharingan. It was burned into his memory. He was never, ever going to forget.

The look on Iruka's face was also pretty good, honestly.

Kakashi had debated preventing the horrible showdown with Mizuki-sensei after Naruto's failure of the graduation exam, but it occurred to him that several very important events happened there: Iruka acknowledged Naruto in a way that would secure him Naruto's affection for the rest of his life, and Mizuki told Naruto about the fox.

No, it seemed pretty important to let that one play out. So he didn't do anything to fix Naruto's appalling clone technique, even though it would have been a simple thing to scribble out a scroll containing the instructions for the shadow clone. It wasn't like he'd needed a teacher for it the first time.

As they edged closer and closer to puberty Kakashi had the wearying experience of watching Naruto try to get Sakura's attention every day.

"Ano sa, ano sa, Sakura-chan, today will you eat lunch with-"

CRACK.

At least Sakura got to practice her right hook.

Sakura was... well, she was coming along. She was certainly just as bright as she had been in the earliest timeline, but she was also the one Kakashi had least access to. As time went on, her fascination with Sasuke developed. Kakashi couldn't really tell why, but the social conditioning of little girls was absolutely mysterious to him.

Still, he had a sneaking suspicion that it actually had something to do with Sakura's burgeoning self-confidence and her need to challenge Ino at something. The fact that Sasuke was involved was just...

Unfortunate.

Equally unfortunate was the way Sakura's infatuation with Sasuke just made Naruto resent him more and more. And every fight he picked with Sasuke...

...well, it rarely seemed to end in Naruto's favour. For several reasons, Sasuke was well and truly ahead of the curve as far as new genin should be concerned.

For his part, Sasuke was still the top student of his class. He was motivated to train until he dropped by the remaining compulsion of Itachi's genjutsu and there wasn't really anything Kakashi could do about that, even though he knew from experience that it would be better for him in the long run if he slowed down a little.

Torture left a very strong impression on a person's psyche. As soon as Itachi had hit Sasuke with Tsukuyomi, well... all Sasukes, in all timelines, apparently wanted to be strong enough to kill - or, as Sasuke would never admit and Kakashi was beginning to suspect, to defend against - Itachi.

But the Uchiha Sasuke in this timeline had a secondary, less weighty but more immediately frustrating goal: He still could not escape from Kakashi.

He was, Kakashi had to grant, becoming very creative.

Although Kakashi couldn't tell if Sasuke's willingness to set people on fire was promising or ominous.

"Mou," he said, dropping down from a nearby roof once the smoke from Sasuke's jutsu had cleared, "Sasuke-kun, friends don't set friends on fire."

Sasuke was getting too old to flinch when Kakashi surprised him, but there was still an adorable tell-tale stillness. He turned, shoving his hands into his pockets, and scowled up at Kakashi.

It was a good thing that the streets of the Uchiha district were completely deserted, and the night was dark. Somebody might have thought they were arguing.

As it was, he flicked a lazy hand sign in response to Tenzou's alarmed flicker of chakra on a roof a few streets over. Sasuke's eyes caught the hand sign, but he didn't seem to register who Kakashi was signing to. Hmm.

"We're not friends," Sasuke growled.

"Oh?" Kakashi asked, tilting his head. "That's hurtful, you know." He paused. Somewhere a wooden sign swung on a chain that had become rusty. It squeaked in the evening breeze. "Also, it's not like you have any other friends."

And Kakashi would know, because he had made a point of stalking his kids with a terrible determination.

"I don't need friends," Sasuke pointed out.

"Mmm," Kakashi tapped his chin through the mask. "Yes," he said slowly. "You do. You know that graduate ninja are put in three-man teams, don't you?"

"So?"

"So you're going to have to work with your team, Sasuke-kun," Kakashi sighed, rolling his visible eye. "You can sulk and cry and tell everybody that they're holding you back if you like, but ultimately..." he gave Sasuke a long, grave look.

"Ultimately," he said seriously, "Konoha shinobi work in teams. We have since the time of the Shoudai Hokage. If all you want is to be able to kill Itachi..."

Sasuke flinched at the sound of his name between them, but Kakashi was relentless.

"You should give up now."

"What?"

"Give up. If you can't be relied upon to work in a team, you can't be a Konoha ninja."

Sasuke looked frustrated. "But I need to kill him!"

"You don't need to be a ninja to be a murderer, Sasuke."

The expression on Sasuke's face was so shocked that Kakashi might have laughed, if the entire conversation wasn't so terribly depressing.

"Do you want to be a ninja? Or do you just want to be strong enough to kill Itachi? You can become strong enough either way, you know," he admitted, which was probably a little risky, since there was a chance Sasuke might just decide not to graduate, which -

Oh, well. Too late now. And it did have the advantage of being the truth. He ploughed on relentlessly. "But I pity the teacher who has to waste his time with you if all you want is to be a killer."

For a few long moments, Sasuke looked small and lost.

Kakashi heaved a sigh. He remembered being an eleven year old orphan. Too bad Minato wasn't around to pour all his sunshine into this one. "Tea?" he said, nodding toward the door to the main house.

Sasuke took a breath like he was going to argue, but then he glanced toward the crater his fire jutsu had made - which Kakashi had avoided so effortlessly.

Then he preceeded Kakashi inside and set the kettle to boiling.

Conversations with Sasuke were hard.

And frequently not that rewarding. He was young, self absorbed, stubborn and frankly more than half crazy. He couldn't be relied upon to trust anybody with anything, acted paranoid and resentful, and had the exhausting post-traumatic triggers of a ninja three times his age.

But this time around Kakashi had seen the nightmares, the sleepless nights, the flashbacks and shaking hands and sleeping pills and guilt.

Worst of all, he'd seen Sasuke slowly growing into his brother's clothes. He didn't stop wearing them.

He hadn't stopped wearing them, Kakashi had come to realise, until he left Konoha and joined Orochimaru.

Obito was no help. Not that he ever was, really.

"Your baby cousin," Kakashi said to him, ignoring the morning drizzle, "is just one giant headache."

Kakashi was perched idly in the branches of a tree, reading his book quietly, while Suzume-sensei took one of her classes of kunoichi through the basics of flower arranging. She was an intelligence specialist, Kakashi recalled. He wasn't really making an effort to hide from her, but if she noticed him he couldn't tell at all.

Which meant that either she hadn't noticed him, or she had noticed him and she was a very, very good actress.

Hard to say.

Still, he had to keep up with his Sakura-watching hobby, and now that he had been told by Sarutobi that he'd be stuck with whichever genin made it onto Uchiha Sasuke's team, he had a good reason to be observing these kids. He wasn't even the only one, really. Asuma didn't mind flying by the seat of his pants, but Kurenai... she would definitely be checking out the potential.

She could even be here right now, he thought idly. He was unlikely to know unless he moved his hitae-ate, because Kurenai's genjutsu were very, very good.

Kakashi was no stranger to the sudden onset of snarling protective urges - he felt that way about all his comrades, even the ones who, at the time, had seriously outranked him. He felt that way about his dogs, too. And, unsurprisingly, he felt that way about team seven.

He was actually not at all prepared for Sakura and Ino to be interrupted in their flower-picking by one of the students who regularly made Sakura miserable.

"Have you been trying to look cute?" Ami wondered, poking Sakura in the forehead. Ino looked mutinous. Her mouth twisted and her eyes narrowed. "You shouldn't flatter yourself, forehead-girl."

This time Kakashi knew he'd definitely caught Suzume's attention, because she tensed at the sudden, tiny, angry flare of his chakra.

That was... embarrassing.

Suzume she clearly had no idea what had caused it. He watched her adjust her glasses and do a swift, efficient head-count, felt her flare her own chakra looking for genjutsu.

Great. He'd put her on alert. It was a good thing, really - taking the kids out of the village proper like this was always a little risky, and there were a couple of clan kids out here that would be worth a fortune in ransom, even discounting the other, less civilised possibilities.

Still. Kakashi... probably... hadn't needed to stress everybody out because a prepubescent girl was picking on one of his kids.

"Shinobi-san," said Suzume, who had come to stand beneath his tree. She was picking cosmos, perhaps for a demonstration later.

"Ahh... a spider fell down," he said, peering down at her with an insincere smile curving his eye.

"A spider," she echoed. One of her eyebrows twitched. "Is that so."

"Yep," he said blithely. "Spiders. Very... surprising." He coughed. "Maa, well," he said, and laughed nervously for a second, and then performed a lightning fast body flicker into another tree.

Two seconds later a note arrived, tied to the end of a kunai like an explosive tag. It had one word on it: Smooth.

Somebody was out there, and since it wasn't Asuma - whose genjutsu were usually at best an insult to Kakashi's senses - it was probably Kurenai laughing at him from somewhere in the trees.

Somebody screamed, high and terrified. Suzume was off the mark like a shot.

Kakashi turned his attention in the direction of Ino and Sakura, and -

And he grinned behind his mask, because that mean-faced purple-haired little shit was covering her head, screaming like she was being - ineptly - murdered.

"Hell-viewing, huh? That's not a technique an academy student should know," Kurenai's voice intruded from right beside him. It didn't sound as close as it was, just a gentle murmur on the breeze.

He twitched and then quickly aborted the movement that would have skewered her.

He hadn't even smelled her, which - that was just showing off. There was nobody else here from whom she'd need to disguise her scent. With a ripple she was there, red eyes intent upon the little knot of girls. She seemed unconcerned about the possibility of startling him.

All of the students were blithely swearing to Suzume-sensei that they had no idea what had happened. Ino and Sakura, Kakashi noticed, were both good liars.

"Was that Yamanaka-san's daughter?" Kurenai muttered. "Who is the other child?"

"Civilian kid," Kakashi drawled.

"Probably not her, then," Kurenai murmured thoughtfully.

A short distance away, Ami had settled down - or been settled down, as might be more accurately the case - and the class was steadily encouraged to get back to work. Suzume looked annoyed, but she didn't seem to have any better luck than anybody else at detecting the caster of that genjutsu.

If Kakashi hadn't given her all the tools to learn it, even he wouldn't have immediately known it was Sakura. Eventually, maybe. But...

Yes, she was doing fine.

"I'm done here," he said decisively, prompting a surprised glance from Kurenai, and then he left her blinking as he disappeared in a rustle of leaves.

Kakashi kept an eye out over the next several months as Sasuke continued to achieve outstanding results - less through actual genius and more through sheer bloody-minded determination, which Kakashi would be the first to admit could work equally well - and Sakura continued to achieve an uninspiring average, bolstering her insipid physical skills with keen analyses and a solid memory. Naruto...

Naruto continued to skip class and make a nuisance of himself.

Those weeks of racing around the village like a hyperactive ferret instead of studying didn't make him look any happier when graduation day came, though.

Kakashi stayed perched up in his tree, flicking pages on his book as Naruto sat, disheartened, on the swing below.

Sometimes Naruto was so unobservant that Kakashi simply did not understand his continued survival.

(Then he remembered the Kyuubi. Ah. Yes. That.)

Whatever the case, Kakashi didn't have to take great pains to hide himself where he was perched in the tree - since it was only Naruto he was really hiding from, until Mizuki finished up. Sasuke, unsurprisingly, noticed him within about three minutes of exiting the academy wearing his brand new hitae-ate.

He eyed Kakashi uncertainly.

Kakashi smiled at him, eye crinkling up, and waved with his copy of Icha Icha Paradise.

In hindsight, he really wished he'd brought some kind of deeply embarrassing banner congratulating Sasuke on his graduation. It could be a lot easier to hide in plain sight - Naruto need never have known he was being observed if Kakashi had just shown up to humiliate Sasuke...

And Sasuke was probably just going to go home and contemplate the fuss Mikoto would have made over him if the massacre hadn't happened.

Kakashi scratched his chin thoughtfully through his mask. Well. There'd be plenty of other opportunities to make Sasuke's head explode with humiliation. Kid took himself much too seriously.

Sakura's mother showed up to congratulate her personally, having taken the time off work to walk her daughter home. Kakashi supposed that even if civilian parents couldn't possibly understand what her career really entailed, they could be supportive in their own weird, obliviously ignorant kind of way.

Kakashi slunk around the trunk of his tree, blending easily into its shadows, and waited for Mizuki to approach Naruto.

It didn't take long.

He'd give him this: Mizuki wasn't a half-bad actor. He wasn't as good as Suzume had been, but he'd probably come by his chuunin rank honestly.

Kakashi followed along in cat-footed silence. He averted his gaze when Naruto used his ridiculous transformation to get past the Hokage - which, admittedly, ridiculous or not, that was a good distraction technique. He stalked him - really stalked him, silent and watchful and intent as hell, just in case he'd changed too much, in case something went wrong - out to the forest.

It was funny, he contemplated, that as soon as one person - one person - indicated that he really believed Naruto could do it, the kid went above and beyond. Mizuki, for all his cruel intentions, had given him a chance... and Kakashi watched him learn a B-rank technique in a couple of hours.

It didn't take much encouragement to get a lot of mileage out of Naruto.

Kakashi's fears proved to be unfounded. Naruto learned the jutsu and learned the truth about the Kyuubi from Mizuki. Iruka was injured defending Naruto. Naruto beat Mizuki more or less senseless.

Kakashi watched Iruka strap his own scuffed hitae-ate onto Naruto's head, and then followed - again, silently - as Naruto helped the chuunin to the hospital, where he received medical treatment.

"Ne, ne, Iruka-sensei, didn't you say we'd get ramen?"

All in a day's work, Kakashi supposed.

The following day Kakashi spent some time telling Minato about his kid. How the village treated him, and how proud Minato would have been to know he persevered anyway. A little weird, a little messed up, but not hateful and bitter. How he was loud and cheerful and determined in the face of constant, seething disapproval.

He told him about Naruto's stupid pranks, because Minato would appreciate those.

He told him how like Kushina he was.

Kakashi stared at the cenotaph for a long time in silence.

Back in the classroom, Naruto steamed and hissed in a heap while Iruka was explaining the premise of the three-man team. Beside him, Sakura shot excited glances at Sasuke every time he so much as twitched.

Every so often she'd remember that the particular stoniness of Sasuke's stony expression today had had Naruto's mouth as a contributing factor.

Naruto's mouth.

On Sasuke's mouth.

She twitched, leaned over, and smacked Naruto again.

"I'm sure it doesn't count," she said quietly to Sasuke. Sasuke's dark eyes shifted to her, but his expression didn't change, and his gaze returned to Iruka immediately.

"I wonder who's going to be in Sasuke-kun's team," Ino mused from the seat behind Sakura.

Sakura turned her head part way, just enough to catch Ino's gaze. "I don't know," she said in a flat voice.

"A group of three," Sasuke muttered from next to her. "I guess he was right..."

"Eh?" Sakura turned immediately from Ino to Sasuke. "Who was right?"

Sasuke looked at her intently, as though he was suddenly evaluating her in a very serious light. Sakura blushed. "Sa... Sasuke-kun..."

"Team Seven," Iruka said from the front of the classroom, interrupting their sudden staring match. "Uzumaki Naruto."

"Eh? Eh?" Naruto jerked upright and looked around.

"Haruno Sakura."

"YATTA!" Naruto leapt to his feet.

Sakura made a sad noise in her throat, and behind her she heard Ino snicker.

"And Uchiha Sasuke."

The snickering behind her abruptly stopped. Sakura grinned, and gave a little whoop of victory. Take that, Ino-pig!

Sasuke fought off the urge to heave a huge, resigned sigh.

Later that afternoon, team seven watched all the other instructors come and go, taking their teams of students with them. Eventually even Iruka had to leave, although he seemed to have some concerns about leaving Naruto alone in the academy after hours.

"Mou," Sakura sighed, watching Naruto shove his head through the door and make annoyed noises while he squinted up and down the corridor for their tardy teacher, "can't you just sit still?"

If he heard her at all, he ignored her. Thirty seconds later, he was diving into Iruka's desk drawers, looking for something specific.

He scooted over to the door and carefully set a blackboard eraser in the crack between the door and its frame so it would fall upon the unwary person who next opened it.

"If he gets hit," Naruto said, laughing, "it'll be his own fault!"

"A jounin isn't going to fall for a trap like that," Sasuke predicted in a flat voice.

Naruto unwound the reel of wire he'd gotten from Iruka's desk. It glinted like steel under the overhead lights. "That's not the trap," he said, grinning. "That's the distraction."


	5. Chapter 5

Kakashi took one step into the classroom and was, briefly, a little disappointed that the trap laid for him appeared not to have changed at all in this time line.

Then he caught a tripwire around the ankle, and there was the sound of snapped wires singing in the air, the alarming crackle-pop of black powder, and -

\- ah, yes, that looked messy.

Kakashi executed a textbook perfect replacement technique.

Naruto, unfortunately, was not as quick as Kakashi, and so he was allowed to feel the full effects of his own genius as a creative combination of multicoloured paint, goose down and glitter exploded beneath his feet.

He swayed in the doorway.

“...eh?” he said, blinking.

Kakashi let his eye crinkle into a smiling crescent. It was so nice to be with his cute students again, wasn’t it?

“Eh?” he looked wide-eyed around the room.

“A-ah, Sensei! I tried to stop him,” Sakura said. She was, Kakashi noted again, quite a good liar. Hmm.

He patted her head absently. Her bright eyes peered up at him with a half-hidden expression between pleased and annoyed.

“Maa, my first impression is...”

“You,” interrupted Sasuke, rocketing to his feet.

“Me,” Kakashi said.

“Eh?” Sakura looked around. “You know him?”

Sasuke’s eye twitched.

Kakashi beamed.

Naruto made a muffled noise of protest, buried as he was beneath the giant pile of feathers and paint.

“Maa, well, you might be salvageable,” he said after a moment, as though he was really debating it. They were his now - legally, not just because he was stalking them. All his. “I’ll meet you at training ground seventy six in five minutes,” Kakashi told them.

“Eh?” Sakura blinked. “But seventy six is --”

“Five minutes,” Kakashi repeated cheerfully.

Sasuke was the first to arrive, scraping in at five minutes and eight seconds. Naruto showed up next, glowering fiercely and full of fire and indignation and, incidentally, covered in paint and feathers - five minutes and thirty seconds. Hmm.

Sakura was last, which was to be expected at this point in their development, but she was a full minute slower than Sasuke, and she looked about ready to drop when she got there.

“The average genin should be able to sprint two kilometers in five minutes and ten seconds,” Kakashi informed them. He patted Sasuke roughly on the head before the boy could dodge.

Sasuke swatted at his hand, but he was much too slow.

“Ano... we just graduated... sensei,” Sakura pointed out. “Surely...”

“Maa... I see one of us wants to be average,” Kakashi drawled.

Sakura bristled.

“All right,” he said, ignoring her indignation. “We’re going to introduce ourselves. Names, strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, hobbies and dreams, that sort of thing. Except you’re going to introduce each other - Naruto, introduce Sasuke; Sakura, introduce Naruto; Sasuke, introduce Sakura.”

They looked at him with varying degrees of mutinous horror and confusion.

Sasuke glowered at him. “Who introduces you, sensei?”

“You went to the academy with one another for years. Presumably,” he said, eyeing them, “you know each other. Go.”

There was silence.

It was a long silence.

“I see we don’t want to be genin after all,” Kakashi drawled. “I suppose I’d better go and tell Iruka-sensei to f--”

“Haruno Sakura,” interrupted Sasuke in a flat and unhappy voice. “She’s twelve. She likes...” he paused, but then grimly went on, “me. She dislikes... Yamanaka, evidently... and this idiot...” he stopped there. “She’s from a civilian family. She does well in theoretical tests and ninjutsu practice but she has little stamina and below-average practical skills. I ...don’t know her hobbies or dreams,” he said.

He was, Kakashi thought, prevaricating slightly. Sasuke knew at least one of her dreams, because Kakashi had seen her asking him out over and over and over, but it was probably an attempt to avoid the topic.

It wasn’t to spare her feelings. Sakura’s face was already burning.

“Hey!” Naruto growled, smacking Sasuke in the arm. “Don’t talk about Sakura-chan that way! She has lots of strengths!”

“Naruto, enough," said Kakashi before it could get out of hand.

“Temeeee," he growled, but he subsided.

Sasuke’s wasn’t a great report, although it showed that at least he’d been paying attention sometimes. It would have been hard not to pick up those facts. Kakashi nodded lazily, but said nothing. “Sakura,” he prompted. “Your turn.”

Sakura blinked. Her eyes were bright with a wetness that made Kakashi feel very awkward. He had no idea how to respond to crying people either way, so he just stared at her.

She took a deep breath. “Uh,” she started, glancing at Naruto, who was looking at her expectantly. When her eyes fell upon him he blushed gently and scratched the back of his neck.

She scowled. “Uzumaki Naruto. He likes ramen and pulling stupid pranks. He dislikes...” she paused thoughtfully. “Sasuke-kun,” she settled on finally. “He’s...” she stopped here.

There was a long pause.

“I don’t know,” she said lamely, finally, scowling at the ground. “There’s nothing he’s good at. He gets distracted. He’s loud. He’s annoying. He’s dead-last at literally everything.”

Naruto seemed to sink lower with every damning comment.

Kakashi hummed thoughtfully. “So? What are Naruto’s hobbies and dreams?” he prompted.

Sakura looked embarrassed, but she shrugged. Naruto remained

Kakashi glanced sideways at Sasuke. “Any ideas?”

There was a pause. 

“...I think he wants to be the Hokage,” Sasuke said, absolutely deadpan.

Naruto apparently found himself bolstered by this suspicion, because he pumped a fist in the air. “Yeah,” he yelled. “I’m gonna be the best Hokage ever, bastard, you’d better believe it!”

“Hai, hai...” Kakashi said, dismissing this with a wave of his hand. “It’s your turn, future Hokage-san,” he pointed out.

The cheerful sarcasm earned him a mulish look, but Naruto glowered over at Sasuke for a second anyway. “Uchiha Sasuke. He doesn’t like anything -”

“That’s not true!” Sakura snapped. She leaned over and smacked him over the head. “Do it properly!”

“But Sakura-chan,” Naruto said plaintively, “he doesn’t like anything. He’s a sullen bastard. He’s - ow! Sakura-chaaaan,” he whined, rubbing his head.

Sakura raised her fist threateningly.

Sasuke stared blankly ahead as though none of this was going on. His eyes seemed to hover somewhere around Kakashi’s sandals. Kakashi tried to read his expression, but Sasuke wasn’t very expressive to begin with. Disquiet, maybe.

“...bastard doesn’t like lots of things. Puppies. Kittens. Flowers. Sunshine,” Naruto continued, glowering sullenly at Sasuke over Sakura’s shoulder. “Ramen.”

Kakashi didn’t correct him, but he did know that any time he’d sent one of his dogs to skulk around the Uchiha compound and keep an eye on that messed up kid, it came back late and full of table scraps. So mentally he struck off “puppies” - Sasuke, he suspected, like every remotely reasonable human being, rather liked puppies. Just quietly.

Naruto made a facial expression that was very complicated for a few moments. “He’s... alright, at most things,” he muttered. “But he’s a jerk,” he added vehemently. “And I don’t know if he has any hobbies or dreams because he doesn’t talk to anybody, which is part of the jerk thing.”

Kakashi eyed them all for a few long moments. He let them hang long enough for the silence to become awkward. Naruto shifted restlessly. Sakura began to get nervous. Sasuke just looked through him with a thousand-mile stare that Kakashi was quite familiar with.

He’d debated giving the kids the same bell test. It was traditional, and it was good for gaugeing a genin team’s capacity for good teamwork. On the other hand, it was fairly redundant: he knew they’d pass, and there were other ways to teach teamwork. And if Sarutobi asked... well, he’d already pointed out to Kakashi that he was obligated to take Sasuke.

Also he had the sneaking suspicion that the bell test? Had been a little too subtle for his kids.

They were good kids, he thought defensively, but they weren’t the most self-aware bunch.

He smiled at the kids. “Today’s going to be a learning experience,” he informed them. “You’re going to go for a run.”

“A run?” Sakura asked, looking puzzled.

“Ehh?” Naruto tilted his head, eyeing Kakashi as though he was profoundly stupid.

There was a hint of suspicion in Sasuke’s eyes, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

He flicked open the pocket of his flak jacket and produced his summoning scroll. “Yep,” he agreed.

Bull, Urushi and Shiba appeared in a puff of smoke.

“Well?” Kakashi drawled. “Why aren’t you running?”

Sasuke got it first, as he was wont to do - and, also as he was wont to do, he took off without even glancing at his team mates. Bull darted after him, huge-muscled and swift for his size.

“Eh? Sasuke-kun!” Sakura yelped and scrambled to catch him.

Naruto was still standing there. “Eh?" he looked one way. “Eh?" he looked another.

Urushi scratched an ear with his back foot. Shiba heaved a sigh.

Kakashi smiled at him. “A ninja who can’t obey orders is going to die,” he said cheerfully to Naruto. “Urushi, Shiba,” he added.

A low, rumbling growl caught in the chests of both dogs almost at the same time, hackles raised, they advanced.

Naruto blinked once.

Urushi spread his jaws, flashing long pale teeth. His growl deepened.

Naruto turned and fled - but not before Shiba flanked him and tried to take a chunk out of his calf. “Shit! Shit, shit, shitshit!” He disappeared in a blur of orange and feathers.

Kakashi raised his face - what was exposed of it - to the sun and smiled behind his mask, a little more genuinely. Really, his kids were too adorable.

The urge to go tell Obito all about it was strong, but... Well, he’d been guilty of not keeping a close enough eye on them all once before. He sighed, stretched his spine out with a shivery pop, and took off after his dogs at an easy lope.

It didn’t really take him long to find Sasuke. Bull was used to working with ANBU - they ran a lot faster than genin, even talented genin, did.

From a distance it looked as though Bull had just gotten bored and flopped over sideways, but a keen eye could see two standard-issue sandals peeking out from beneath his huge, furry bulk.

Kakashi ambled around his dog, looking for the boy’s head.

The head was there, but it was also covered in an obscene amount of slobber.

Bull wagged his tail happily at Kakashi. He licked Sasuke’s face again, with a tongue like a very wet side of beef.

Sasuke made a noise a little like a broken hinge.

Kakashi reached out and tapped him on the forehead with the spine of Icha Icha Paradise. He was basically immune to dog drool on his possessions.

Sasuke opened his eyes, squinting through the slobber.

“Ne,” said Kakashi pleasantly, “don’t you wish you had some team mates to help you right now?”

He didn't really answer. Instead, he glowered at Kakashi. “I can’t believe you’re my jounin sensei,” he growled.

Kakashi shared a look with his dog, and Bull heaved a huge sigh and slapped one enormous paw over... most of Sasuke’s face.

“Yep,” Kakashi drawled, just as though Sasuke had never spoken. “It sure would be nice to have team mates to help you out of this situation.”

Sasuke yelled something, but it was muffled under about two hundred kilograms of fuzzy muscle and drool and teeth.

“Ye-ep,” Kakashi said again, cracking his book back open.

Naruto fled past about a minute later, shrieking bloody murder as Shiba snapped at his heels. The dog was not trying very hard to catch him - it was more like shepherding, to the ninken.

Naruto fled past again another ten minutes later, and this time Shiba had let him put enough distance between them that he paused, glanced at the mop of Sasuke’s hair bristling out from beneath Bull’s paw, and promptly fell over howling with laughter.

Bull heaved another huge sigh. He gave Kakashi a reproachful look.

“Maa, well,” said Kakashi loudly, eyeing Sasuke. “I suppose Naruto’s not a very good ninja right now, either.”

“EH?” Naruto stopped laughing. “What? I’m the one who lost your dumb dog!” he pointed out, pointing at Kakashi. “He’s the one who got c--OW!” he finished, as Shiba tore a hole in his pants.

Bull shifted a little, allowing the boy under him space to shift and breathe. He didn’t want to crush the kid. Hadn’t even bitten him. Really, it was all pretty friendly.

Kakashi looked at Sasuke and shrugged as Naruto bolted off in the opposite direction, swearing at the dog chasing him.

“Aren’t you meant to be my team mate?” Sasuke said, spitting out a clump of fur. And drool.

That... was actually unexpected. And interesting. And good.

Kakashi closed his book, peering thoughtfully at the kid. “Technically,” he said, “I’m your ranking officer. But I suppose you could argue we’re on the same team,” he agreed.

“Then aren’t you a bad ninja, too?” he spat.

“Hmm,” said Kakashi. “I suppose I could help you up,” he agreed slowly, prompting a bright spark to flare in Sasuke’s gaze. “But I’d need you to let me know if you’ve reconsidered yet.”

“Reconsidered?” He looked blank.

“Maa, Sasuke-kun,” Kakashi sighed, rocking back on his heels. “We’ve already had this discussion. Keep up.”

Sasuke could generate a surprising amount of killing intent for a genin.

Kakashi bent over him, meeting his glowering eyes with his own sober grey one, casting his shadow over the boy. “If you want to be a ninja or not.”

Sasuke blinked. “Of course I --”

Kakashi smacked his book down on Sasuke’s face, hard, with a thick whap. “So stop thinking like a killer and start thinking like a ninja. What do you have to do?"

Sasuke looked pale and horribly conflicted.

“I...”

Kakashi fought the urge to brain himself on the nearest tree. Honestly.

“I have to work with my team,” Sasuke muttered rebelliously, looking the other way. He looked like the words were physically painful for him.

Finally.

“Bull,” Kakashi said, and the dog wagged his tail once and got to his feet, leaving Sasuke sore and pancaked in the dirt. Kakashi scratched the huge dog’s head idly.

Sasuke stared at the sky and breathed for a few moments. It was a lot like learning to reinflate his lungs.

“You might want to catch up with Sakura,” Kakashi said thoughtfully. “I think she needs your help.”

Sasuke opened his mouth to argue, but then he seemed to think better of it. He turned his face away.

“I’ll give you a head start, Sasuke-kun,” Kakashi said, watching him get gingerly to his feet. “Ten seconds.”

Sasuke looked at him, alarmed.

“Nine,” he added.

Then Sasuke was gone.

Next to Kakashi, Bull heaved a giant sigh.

“Kid’s messed up,” he rumbled.


	6. Chapter 6

They weren’t done until hours later, when finally a combined effort of distraction and stealth allowed Sasuke and Sakura to free Naruto from the branches of the tree where he’d been cornered by all three dogs.

Then the chase was on again.

Because: of course.

...What? Just because they were working as a team didn’t mean Kakashi was going to make it easy for them. Besides, the dogs could use the exercise.

When the dogs finally got bored and poofed away, all three kids fell in a heap and sat there, panting. Naruto was, of course, the first to recover. Sasuke gave him a toxic look for that.

Kakashi made a show of checking where the sun was in the sky. “Since you did so well at your training game,” he said, which was an absolute lie - they were slower than he remembered and stupider than he remembered, and he had to keep reminding himself that his precious students had only been his for one day, and he had plenty of time, “I got a mission for you from the Hokage.”

Naruto perked up.

Sasuke kind of... twitched. It was an enthusiastic sort of twitch, Kakashi decided. That was good.

Sakura looked at him dully.

She was not doing well.

She’d always had the worst stamina of the three of them, and even when she’d grown older and improved in leaps and bounds, it had been nothing to write home about. Compared to Naruto and Sasuke, who were already above average and would grow into ridiculous, monstrous powerhouses...

She was going to need to learn how to compensate very quickly if she wanted to keep up. (That was all right. Kakashi had grand plans for little Sakura-chan.)

Kakashi twirled their mission scroll around his fingers. “Come on then," he said cheerfully, making vague herding motions to get them to their feet.

None of them looked like moving was in their near futures.

Kakashi pulled a kunai and hurled it at Naruto. It was a strategic choice, because Naruto would be the fastest to recover from exhaustion and also the fastest to heal if Kakashi misjudged and he didn’t manage to dodge.

But he did, flailing and yelling, and all Kakashi had to do was idly toss another kunai from one hand to the other, smiling, to persuade his other two students to their feet.  
He herded them on their way.

Naruto looked mutinous when he discovered what their mission was to be. Sasuke and Sakura certainly didn’t look any happier, but they didn’t have the energy for much in the way of protesting.

“Well,” sighed Kakashi, scratching the back of his head, “Konoha’s citizens need to eat, don’t they?”

“Of course,” Sakura said, eyeing the reeking grey-brown swamp ahead of them. It was in a valley between the lush trees of fire country. The mosquitoes were as big as her eyeballs.

“Food supply is one of the most important factors for a hidden village,” he told them seriously. “If we can’t get our own food from our own civilians, we would have to rely on a supply of food that might be compromised or unsecured.”

Naruto was rubbing his chin thoughtfully now.

“All that means is that a farmer came to the mission office and put in a request that somebody turn this swamp,” Sasuke’s tone of voice made ‘swamp’ sound like ‘burning pit of sulfurous death,’ “- into actual farmland.”

“Eh? So all that’s a lie?” Naruto yelped, then turned on Kakashi. “Kakashi-sensei!”

“Neither’s a lie,” Sakura said, looking dully out at the swamp. “They’re both right.”

Kakashi shrugged. “It’s a D-ranked mission,” he pointed out. He eyed them. Sometimes you had to be really obvious with his kids. Sakura not so much, but Sasuke didn’t tend to comprehend anything he didn’t want to, and Naruto was... Naruto. He sighed. “Genin get D-ranked missions because they’re not very dangerous, and they’re low enough priority that if you make a mistake it won’t cause much trouble for Konoha -”

“We’re not going to make a mistake!” Naruto protested, looking deeply affronted.

“Saa...” Kakashi gave him a contrived dubious look. “I wonder.”

That was all it took for Naruto to be off, clones bursting into being across the swamp and yelling at each other as they tried to figure out how to turn swamp land into farm land.

Sasuke gave him a hard, challenging stare, before he went off to corral one of the clones and tell it what it was actually meant to be doing. Kakashi saw it blink at him, saw the concept roll across Naruto’s cloned face in a flicker of surprise and dawning comprehension, and then saw it disappear with a pop.

“Aha!” Echoed across the swamp, as the score of Narutos all seemed to become party to that epiphany all at once.

Sakura gave Kakashi a look that said she knew what he was up to and she wasn’t impressed in the slightest before she scowled out at the swamp and went to help.

The kids spent the next five hours turning a reeking swamp into arable land.

Kakashi watched from his perch in a tree above the area they were toiling in, smiling occasionally at some particularly vicious argument.

“Idiot,” Sasuke muttered about thirty seconds after he’d managed to get the Narutos in on whatever his plan was. He dragged one of them away from the ditch he was digging - hard to say at this point if it was the original or not. “It’s not going to flow uphill!”

“Hey!” Naruto snapped back, flailing one arm and managing to smack Sasuke in the back of the head, “You wanna do this?”

Sasuke made a frustrated noise, and then grunted sourly as though that was actually a response.

“Naruto!” Sakura snapped. “Sasuke-kun’s right. We need to drain the water first, and that means using the angle of the hill to draw it off naturally.”

Naruto scowled but, as usual, subsided under Sakura’s hard stare.

Draining the water away involved digging successive ditches to provide space for the foul-smelling swamp water to run off, and an awful lot of back-breaking physical labour in general. Sasuke threw himself into it with a kind of grim loathing, and Naruto was a font of boundless, poorly-directed energy.

In a way, he’d picked a task that was going to be hardest for Sakura - none of her natural strengths were useful in this kind of hard, purely physical work. She wasn’t slacking, though, and that would do for now.

Naruto’s clones were dead helpful, it had to be said. They took on the bulk of the work, and made the task go a lot more quickly than it might otherwise have been.

There were a few arguments - Sasuke growling at Naruto, Naruto sniping at Sasuke, Sakura smacking Naruto - it washed over Kakashi with the same gentle familiarity as the sound of roughhousing dogs.

At one point Sasuke transformed into Naruto to avoid Sakura’s fawning, and Kakashi gave him points for strategising. He immediately took them away again when the other Narutos all seemed to know which one he was and turned on him violently.

The only way for them to get rid of the trees dotting the area was to use their teamwork, of course - it wasn’t like Kakashi had picked up this mission only because it was back-breaking, stinky labour and tremendously fun to watch - and Kakashi was totally unsurprised to find the natural distribution of labour fell with Sakura figuring out how to cut down the trees with only what they had on them, Naruto providing the bulk of the actual grunt work, and Sasuke...

Well, mostly Sasuke was setting the felled trees on fire.

Then, once Naruto’s clones had dug the stumps more or less free, he set those on fire, too.

Sasuke, Kakashi reflected, was very fond of fire. He wondered if he should be worried about that...

It was dark before they’d finished.

“What have you all learned?” Kakashi asked cheerfully, peering from one sweaty, filthy face to the next.

There was an exhausted silence.

Kakashi waited. He was patient. He could wait for as long as it took.

Naruto’s stomach growled. It didn’t even have the grace to sound predatory.

“I have to work with my team,” Sasuke finally growled.

Sakura nodded. “If we don’t work together - all of us,” she said, looking past Sasuke to eye Naruto like he was a venemous snake, “we’re going to fail.”

“Or be sat on by a giant dog,” Naruto finished, nodding thoughtfully to himself, even as he rubbed his empty belly.

Sakura looked toward Naruto. She measured the distance.

“Sasuke-kun,” she said tiredly. “Can you --”

Sasuke reached out and smacked Naruto over the back of the head.

“Hey!” he squawked.

Kakashi beamed beneath his mask. Look at his adorable students. They were getting the hang of it already!

When Sakura woke up the next morning, she actually couldn’t move. Her bruises had bruises and her limbs were too stiff for basically anything.

There was a timid knock at her door. “Sakura? Honey? Don’t you have training?”

She made a pained noise when she rolled her neck to look at her clock. She actually couldn’t do it. “Whassatime?” she slurred.

“It’s half past eight,” her mother said.

Sakura made an unhappy noise. She was already late. “Thanks,” she mumbled. “‘M getting up.”

Her mother’s footsteps retreated, and Sakura fought the terrible urge to just roll over and go back to sleep.

And then, with difficulty, she rolled out of bed and thunked to the floor. Her muscles cried and whimpered.

“SAKURA-CHAAAN~”

A yellow and orange blur of whirling limbs and excited yelling hurled open her window and tumbled inside. It landed on her floor with a thump.

“Naruto,” Sakura snarled, and with a huge force of will she staggered to her feet specifically to hit him. “What the hell? You can't just break into a woman's bedroom!" 

Not that there was anything indecent about her - Sakura was wearing pale pink pyjamas with watermelons printed on them. It was hardly scandalous. But it had connotations.

“Itai,” Naruto whined, rubbing his face sadly.

“Kakashi-sensei said we had to come get you,” Sasuke said from the window behind him. He was standing on the sill with his arms crossed, looking away as though he was much too aloof for any of the goings on inside the room. So cool!

“That’s right! Since we’re a team, we can’t leave you behind, Sakura-chan!”

She stared dully at them, wondering if it was too late to change her career plans. Then she looked at Naruto, who was peering at the photographs of her and Ino taped to her bedroom mirror.

“You’re not sore at all, are you?” she asked Naruto resentfully.

“Eh?” he tilted his head toward her. “Sore?”

He said the word like he didn’t know what it meant.

Sakura didn’t have to hit him this time because Sasuke did it for him. “Idiot,” he hissed. Then, “Get dressed,” he added shortly to Sakura, and pulled Naruto away by the collar of his jump suit. Naruto crossed his arms and glowered and let his heels drag across her floor.

Sakura looked longingly at her bed, but then went to her cupboard and pulled out the clothes she’d need to face the day.

The start of their day involved running six and a half miles.

It went downhill from there. Somehow. 

They walked five dogs, weeded thee gardens, caught the most murderously unhappy cat in the Fire Country and then they ended up back in their ex-swamp, where they had to sow seeds into the earth. 

"Is the guy who owns this place actually a farmer?" Naruto wondered as he dragged the huge iron plough along behind him, mulching up the flat dirt in his wake. "Because he doesn't seem to do any, you know, farming."

"Shut up, idiot," Sasuke growled, more out of a desire for peace than out of any real feeling that Naruto was wrong.

By the time night fell, Naruto offered to carry her home, and Sakura actually contemplated it longingly before her innate pride and stubbornness kicked in and she knew she couldn’t allow herself.

“I’ll be fine,” she said grimly. Her muscles felt wobbly and strangely liquid. She'd have given anything just to flop down and sleep it off in the dirt.

Naruto gave her a dubious look, but didn’t push the issue - which was just as well, really. She probably still had just enough energy to punch him in the face. It might even have been worth passing out from sheer exhaustion afterwards.

Sasuke grunted and turned to leave, heading silently and slowly for his own house. Sakura suspected that he was almost as stiff and sore as she was.

In the end, Sakura did make it home under her own power - just - and fell into bed again without taking off any of her filthy clothes.

It felt like it had been barely twenty minutes before she woke shrieking to the unpleasant sensation of somebody dumping a small waterfall over her head.

“Good morning, Sakura,” Kakashi-sensei said, smiling behind his mask.

She sputtered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short chapter, but this is what I've got done, and I thought you might appreciate seeing it


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